Assessing the reliability of the Radiation Therapy care delivery process using discrete event simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a discrete event simulation-based analysis of the Radiation Therapy (RT) care delivery process at the Radiation Oncology Center of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill with the goal of assessing process reliability and patient safety. The use of quality assurance (QA) checklists in radiation oncology is a widely recognized method for detecting potential human and non-human errors before they reach the patient. In this study, data on patient safety events (“an incident that reached the patient, whether or not the patient was harmed”) and near misses (“an incident that comes close to reaching the patient but is caught and corrected beforehand”) were collected through a comprehensive safety program and used to estimate incident rates and the reliability score for each QA checklist.